The Ghost Sequences

by A. C. Wise

  How long did his grandfather wait before taking the horseshoes down, trying to give them to her father?

  How long is too long?

  “So, hey, I got a call about a potential job today,” Andrew says.

  His words jolt her again, careening them back to the normal and the mundane, and it’s a moment before Sophie catches her footing.

  “That’s great!” Her voice sounds brittle, almost falsely chipper, and she’s sharply aware of the lag between her response and his words.

  For a moment, Sophie thinks she sees a flicker of disappointment in Andrew’s eyes. But then he looks down, and she tenses reflexively, braced against his words though she doesn’t know why.

  “It’s in L.A.” He looks down. “It sounds like a really great opportunity. They want to fly me out there, which, that’s got to be a good sign, right?”

  The world tilts further, and Sophie fights to wipe the disappointment off her face before Andrew looks up again. He’d told her he wasn’t limiting his job search to local opportunities. She’d known this was a possibility, but now that he actually has an interview scheduled all the way across the country makes that possibility too real. What happens if he gets the job, if he moves away? Daughter of a murder-suicide; a bad seed planted in bad soil—what will she do without the only family she has left in the world?

  “The job wouldn’t start for a few months, so it wouldn’t change anything with the house. I’ll fly out and back and I’ll only be gone a couple of days….”

  He lets the sentence trail. Sophie makes herself breathe, hating the look in his eyes that seeks her approval, hating the selfish thoughts running roughshod through her head while he’s sharing good news.

  “No. That’s great. I’ll keep working here and you’ll go there and you’ll be amazed at how much progress I make while you’re gone.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Sure. Definitely. We should celebrate.” Sophie pushes herself up from the couch, too fast, walking on stiff legs to the kitchen.

  Her chest constricts, and she blinks rapidly. What the hell is wrong with her? This is a good thing for Andrew—a fresh start, a new job, a new city.

  “Soph?” Andrew touches her shoulder, voice soft and questioning.

  She turns, lowering her hand from where she’s been subconsciously worrying at the cuticle of her thumb with her teeth. Too fast and the skin tears. Blood wells along the nailbed and drips from her hand and Sophie hisses in a sharp breath.

  “Shit.” She reaches automatically for the drawer beside the sink, Andrew’s grandmother’s all-purpose junk repository, searching for a bandage.

  “Are you okay? Let me see.”

  “I’m fine.” The words are too sharp, and Sophie jerks away when Andrew reaches again.

  She listens to him moving around the kitchen. When she turns, when she finally gets her hitching breath and prickling eyes under control, he’s holding a sweating beer bottle in one hand. Sophie gapes at him, stunned for a moment, until fear and anger and adrenaline bubble up and bubble over.

  “What the fuck?” She jabs an accusing finger at him and Andrew blinks confusion, lifting his hand and looking at the bottle as if he genuinely wasn’t aware of holding it until she pointed it out to him.

  “What the fuck?” Again, her pulse galloping, and Sophie shoves him, hands landing in the center of Andrew’s chest, leaving drops of blood behind.

  Pushing him feels good. She thinks of her parents. The bruises on her mother’s skin, the cigarettes burns on her father’s arms. The way she tried so desperately to pretend she didn’t see them hurting each other, didn’t hear them shouting.

  They were always the couple everyone wanted to party with, and they never let the fact that they turned into parents along the way stop them. The house was always full of men and women laughing too loud. Empty pizza boxes littering the floor. A constant fug of smoke clinging to the ceiling and walls like a lowering storm.

  Once—she couldn’t have been more than eight years old—she remembers a hand drifting down her back to the waistband of her shorts and dipping inside, and the laughter getting louder and even more raucous as her face turned burning hot and bright, spilling with tears as she fled through the trees and across the yard to Andrew’s grandparents’ door.

  But in the lapses between parties, her parents were different people. It was like without the laughter and other voices filling up the rooms there was too much space, too much silence in which to realize they hated each other. And Sophie alone wasn’t enough to stand between them.

  “Hey, calm down, it’s okay.” Andrew’s tone is placating, he holds a hand out, palm up, like he’s calming a skittish horse. Sophie realizes that somewhere along the way she picked up the knife he’d been using to chop vegetables. She’s clutching it now, tip pointed at him.

  Instead of looking alarmed, Andrew looks amused, one corner of his mouth lifted, a strange light in his eyes.

  “It’s just one beer, Soph. You’re the one who said we should celebrate.”

  He lifts the bottle, takes a deliberately long pull, gaze fixed on hers as if daring her to do something about it. She wants to hit him again. She wants to hurt him. She poured all the beer in the fridge down the drain and she knows neither of them bought new bottles and yet they’re here, like the marigolds. Like her father’s lighter, which he’d claimed to have received from a friend. A token of affection from a bride to her potential groom. And now again, the Nag Bride, trying to tear them apart, tempting them to violence.

  But knowing all this doesn’t help, or make it so she can let go of her anger. If anything, it makes things worse. She grips the knife tighter. She’s shaking. She reaches for the bottle, and Andrew holds it out of her reach.

  “Relax. It’ll be fine.” Light slides through his eyes.

  He’s not Andrew. He’s a complete stranger. Like her father standing on the lawn looking at the trees, playing with the lighter. Waiting for his “friend”, ready to leave his old family behind. Like Everett Moseley walking into the hardware store to buy a shovel to bury his wife. The center of Sophie’s chest feels bruised, as though kicked.

  “I thought you talked to Craig today.”

  “I did. He said the occasional drink is fine.” That quirk to Andrew’s mouth again, shaped like a lie, shaped like he’s testing her.

  What are you going to do, Soph? Are you going to stop me? Or are you going to look the other way?

  “Andrew.” She reaches for the beer again.

  “Seriously, Sophie. Chill.” Andrew’s expression shifts, hard now.

  The house creaks, a distinctive sound like someone stepping on a floorboard. Heavy. Not a regular footfall. A hoof.

  Sophie’s head jerks up, tracking the sound across the ceiling. Her knuckles ache on the knife’s handle, jaw clenched hard.

  Andrew moves, a sudden, darting motion, a feint as if to swat the knife from her hand. But his fingers miss deliberately by a mile, toying with her, laughing at her. She takes a step, her spine bumping against the sink behind her.

  “Don’t.” Her voice shakes.

  She lifts the knife’s point, but doesn’t move as his fingers encircle her wrist. He tightens his grip, wrenching, painful. Her father snatching the lighter from her hand. It was a gift from a friend.

  The crack overhead is distinct this time, impossible to miss. Andrew’s head jerks up at the same time as hers, and they fall back from each other, mouths open, breathing like they’ve just run a mile.

  “The fuck?” Andrew says. “The fuck is happening?”

  Sophie can’t make herself speak, can’t find her voice, like an iron spike has been nailed through her tongue.

  “I’m going to check.” Andrew is already moving toward the hall.

  Sophie lets the knife clatter into the sink. She catches up to him at the foot of the stairs.

  “Don’t.” She touches his arm. He shakes it off, but not violent this time, like a horse shrugging off a stinging fly.
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br />   She listens to him climb the stairs, the creak of each step, and can’t make herself follow. She can only crane her neck to peer after him, one hand gripping the newel post and her heart in her mouth. She listens to Andrew move down the hall, strains for the sound of a hoofstep.

  Her wrist blushes in reverse from red to pale and bloodless, the mark from Andrew’s fingers already fading. After what seems far too long, Andrew comes back down.

  “Must have been the wind.” His eyes are glazed as he says it, pupils widened and cheeks slightly flushed.

  He’s lying.

  She can’t stop herself from thinking it.

  She stares at him, her best friend, her almost-brother. She wants to tell him everything, and she can’t make herself say anything at all.

  *

  Sophie steps onto the front porch. The house feels vast and empty, a weight at her back. She’d offered to drive Andrew to the airport, but he’d declined, ordering a car instead. Sophie had at least walked him out and wished him luck, but even that had felt strained.

  She wraps her arms around herself, watching the trees stir. She searched the entire house after Andrew left, but she can’t shake the sense of someone—something—watching, waiting for her to let her guard down.

  Despite herself, Sophie turns her head in the other direction, looking through the trees to the lights of the house that replaced hers—warm and glowing. The bones of the old house—her house—are still there, calling to her. It doesn’t matter that the house was razed to the foundation, torn out by its roots; it remains—a ghost beneath the skin.

  A shadow-smear of darkness blocks and breaks the light, there and just as quickly gone. She wants to tell herself it’s only a branch, swaying despite the lack of wind, and steps back inside, locking the door.

  As she pours herself a glass of wine, guilt needles her, even though Andrew is out of town. She switches on the TV, and uses her phone to put the feed from the security cameras on the big screen.

  Better to know what’s coming for her. Better, if she’s being watched, to be able to watch in turn.

  She switches to the camera looking down the long drive. Empty for now, but she knows it’s only a matter of time. The Nag Bride has marked them, like she marked Sophie’s father. She already knows their weaknesses—the loss of Andrew’s grandparents, the loss of his job, points of stress and alcohol offered as a balm. And she knows Sophie’s weakness, knows from experience that Sophie will turn her head, look away, deny and deny and deny until it’s too late.

  Sophie leaves the TV on, leaves her glass of wine on the coffee table, and climbs the stairs. She drags her suitcase out from under the bed, digging out the plastic bag wrapped around the horseshoes. She glances out the window and her pulse catches, stutters, and it’s a moment before it consents to start again.

  The woman standing in the cornfield looks up.

  Sophie drops the bundle on the bed and pushes the window up, leaning as far out as she can. There is no mistaking the woman; she is nothing human. Her hair is coarse, like a horse’s mane and even though there’s no wind, it blows across her face. It hides her mouth, but Sophie feels her smile nonetheless, a visceral, terrible thing that needs no witness to be true. The Nag Bride’s smile, like the Nag Bride herself, is rooted in the primal spaces of the world—ancient, recurrent, myth made flesh. She does not require Sophie’s belief or consent, she simply is—her teeth flat and wide and too big for her mouth, distending her jaw.

  Sophie pushes away from the window, grabbing the horseshoes and pounding down the stairs. Iron stops the Nag Bride. It’s in all the stories crammed into the back of Andrew’s grandfather’s album. It’s in Andrew’s grandmother’s promise to Sophie all those years ago.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Sophie nearly trips as her phone’s ringtone pierces the silence. The horseshoes slip from her arms, landing with a heavy clang, just missing her toes. She snatches her phone from the coffee table, the screen lighting with Andrew’s name.

  “Sophie.” His voice slurs.

  Instead of a response, Sophie’s voice catches in her throat, and all that emerges is a strained hiss.

  Andrew sounds wrong. She’s certain he can’t even have landed yet, let alone have reached the hotel and started drinking.

  “I’ve been checking in on the cameras.”

  Sophie pulls the phone away from her ear, looks at the number again. It is Andrew’s number. It’s his voice, but it doesn’t sound like him at all.

  “I saw you outside, and I saw her in the trees. Is that why you wanted me to leave? So you could marry the Nag Bride and have her all to yourself?”

  “No.” Sophie finds her voice, but it’s small, the denial thick and clumsy on her tongue.

  She doesn’t want to marry the Nag Bride; she doesn’t want anything from her.

  But.

  But if Sophie doesn’t marry the Nag Bride, what if she turns to Andrew instead? She’s already divided them, separating them so she can claim one of them.

  This is how the Nag Bride is wed.

  Andrew’s voice comes again, but now it sounds farther away, cut through with a cold wind. He sounds more like himself, but he also sounds afraid, the slurring to his voice not from drink, but from tears.

  “Soph, you have to stop it. You have to… I can’t—” His voice breaks up, an electronic wash of noise crackling down the line, and inside it, a rhythmic sound, like hooves clopping.

  Sophie drops the phone, startled.

  By the time she picks it up again, Andrew is gone.

  “Shit.”

  She dials his number, phone pressed hard to her ear. It rings and rings. No answer, not even voicemail.

  “Shit!” Louder this time and Sophie throws her phone against the couch so it bounces off the cushions and ends up back on the floor.

  Her breath comes ragged and hard. The house creaks again. Not the walls. The porch this time, as though someone—something— just outside the front door is shifting their weight from foot to foot.

  From hoof to hoof.

  The weight, the way the boards creak, whatever stands there holds more mass than a single human woman.

  A thud, heavy enough to shake the house. Sophie steps back automatically, her heart thundering in response.

  The sound comes again, the front door shuddering under a blow, like a horse kicking its stall. She waits for the door to splinter and fly apart. Silence, so terrible and vast that it leaves room for a panicked rush of Sophie’s breath. Then, all at once, the restless prance of hooves. The Nag Bride pacing back and forth.

  Sophie’s chest squeezes, painful and tight. She tries to count, but she can’t tell how many hooves there are—two or four. There’s a hammer and nails in the kitchen junk drawer, but she can’t make herself move.

  Thunk, scrape. Thunk, scrape. The door shivers, a horse pawing a question. The doorknob doesn’t move. The Nag Bride can’t turn it with hooves, but Sophie has seen her long-fingered, bleeding hands. Hysteria tries to crowd the remaining air from Sophie’s lungs, and she chokes back terrified laughter. Thunk, scrape, and at last the sound unfreezes her. She bolts for the kitchen, the junk drawer, the nails.

  Back into the hall. There’s a chair by the door, one Andrew’s grandfather used to sit in to put on his boots. Sophie drags it in front of the door.

  She grabs one of the horseshoes, inexpertly repaired. Who tried to fix them after they were broken? Her father? Did he repent at the end and try to protect himself, her mother, Sophie, but he was already too late?

  Because Sophie turned away. Because she let the Nag Bride cross through the trees and did nothing to stop her?

  The chair wobbles as Sophie climbs. Lining up the nail while holding the horseshoe flush is almost impossible. She’ll drop the shoe, the hammer, or the nails. She’ll accidentally pierce her own hand.

  She fumbles the first nail and it falls to the floor. The sound of it striking the wood is the loudest thing in the world. The steady pace of hooves stops. Liste
ning?

  Sophie lines up another nail and drives the hammer home.

  On the other side of the door, the Nag Bride screams.

  It’s the sound she heard their first night in the house. The sound of a woman, the sound of an animal, both in unspeakable pain. The sound of a nail driven not through wood, but through flesh and bone.

  The hammer slips, and Sophie smashes her thumb. The chair tilts, and she drops the hammer, catching herself before she falls. Pain throbs and she shakes out her hand, the nailbed already turning purple. The horseshoe hangs crookedly, but it stays in place. Sophie scrubs tears from her eyes, climbs down, and goes to the back door to do it all over again.

  Her arms shake by the time she’s done. Every part of her feels wobbly. The Nag Bride no longer paces across the boards, but Sophie doubts she’s gone. The Nag Bride requires a groom. That’s the way it’s always been. The Nag Bride must be wed.

  Sophie returns to the front room where the TV still shows the feed from the security cameras. The Nag Bride stands in plain sight on the drive, and Sophie’s body jerks, a panicked, startled reaction. As if knowing the moment she is seen, the Nag Bride moves, walking slowly up the drive. Her head is bowed, dark hair covering her face, but even so, Sophie feels the too-long shape of her jaw.

  But the Bride’s gait is painful, and for a wild moment, Sophie feels a surge of pity.

  She thinks of nails driven through the woman’s feet, iron weighing her down. There’s a stuttering, halting quality to her steps. Like she isn’t meant to walk on two legs, like the legs she walks upon are bent the wrong way.

  The Nag Bride’s skin invites bruises; her hands and feet beg for nails. She is made to be wed, to be killed, to unbury herself in a terrible cycle. But is she to blame? If she draws violence to the surface of men’s skin, doesn’t that mean the violence was already there?

  If Sophie hadn’t turned away, hadn’t let the Nag Bride pass through the trees, would anything have changed?

  Her father’s choices, they were his own. The Nag Bride didn’t make him do anything he didn’t already want to do.